by Ted Berg, USA TODAY Sports

by Ted Berg, USA TODAY Sports

Pitcher Cliff Lee during his breakout season in 2008. (PHOTO: Aaron Harris/AP Photo)

In a frustrated moment early last baseball season, I cornered a producer friend and convinced him to help me record a song. It's a song I often sing to myself while reading through much of the baseball "analysis" typical of April and May, when it seems far too early to draw meaningful conclusions from any player or team's output in a massively random game at the beginning of an extremely long season. It's sort of obnoxious. It goes like this:

Small sample size! Small sample, sample size! Small sample size! Small sample size!

And so on. Here's the video:

There's little worse than explaining a joke, no less one so straightforward. But the premise is that many strange things happen in small fragments of baseball seasons, and too often our minds trick us into believing a short series of coincidences is something significant.

Think about it: Almost any baseball fan would contend he can tell the difference between a .250 hitter and a .300 hitter. But that difference amounts to only one hit every 20 at-bats. A .250 hitter might go 1-5, 0-5, 3-5, 1-5 across four games while a .300 hitter goes 1-5, 1-5, 3-5, 1-5. And that's if they're performing in a manner consistent with their skill level across those four games â?? the .250 hitter could easily hit .500 over 20 at-bats, the .300 hitter could go hitless. But nonetheless, we convince ourselves the difference between the two hitters is noticeable, even obvious.

It's often hard to trust the human eyes and mind to assess baseball players, and harder still when we're trying to do so with less than ample evidence. And yet every year, when some scrubby slap-hitter gets off to a hot start, someone or some collection of people suggest he has "turned a corner," only to watch him soon turn three more corners and wind up right back on the road to mediocrity.

But on extremely rare occasion, it happens that what looked to be figment of baseball's capriciousness actually indicates something lasting, and a player's performance goes from absurd to astonishing as the evidence mounts.

When Babe Ruth had 12 home runs by the end of May, 1920, there were probably some people who said, jokingly or otherwise, "Hey, he's on pace to hit 48 home runs this year." And because, to that point, no batter had ever hit more than 29 home runs in a season, maybe there was some nattering naysayer like me somewhere, singing, "Small sample size! Small sample, sample size! Small sample size! Small sample size!" And so on.

Ruth hit 54 home runs that year, nearly doubling the record he set the year before and a full 30 more than anyone besides Ruth had hit in a single season in the 20th century. A bunch of factors helped Ruth â?? new equipment and his transition to being a full-time position player among them. But it's hard to imagine any attentive baseball fan, at the outset of 1920, expecting this guy Ruth to hit 25 more home runs than anybody had ever hit in a season before.

Then he did.

Babe Ruth, of best-baseball-player-ever fame. (PHOTO: AP Photo)

For a more recent and less Ruthian example, take the case of lefty starter Cliff Lee, now with the Phillies. Entering the 2008 season, Lee had 741 2/3 innings worth' of evidence to suggest he was about a league-average pitcher. Then Lee allowed only one earned run in his first four starts for the Indians in 2008, striking out 29 and walking only two in 31 2/3 innings. I remember it because I thought it was hilarious, this pedestrian pitcher looking like Walter Johnson for a few weeks. The song didn't exist yet, but I said to my friends, "Small sample size!"

Lee eventually allowed a few more runs, but it soon became indisputably clear he was more than a flash in the pan enjoying a random run of unprecedented luck. Lee has been among the very best pitchers in baseball since the start of that season.

All of which is to say that though baseball's early-season oddities are normally just that, occasionally they're the first signs of something meaningful and awesome. When faced with statistical quirks or short bursts of production in April and May, we can stay mindful that they're probably nonsense and hopeful that they are not.

Baseball's wealth of slim possibilities helps the game appeal to the optimistic, the imaginative and the romantic. Maybe 2013 is the season someone arrives on the scene and hits 25 more home runs than anyone has ever hit before. Maybe the middle-of-the-rotation innings-eater on your favorite team figures something out and wins the Cy Young. Neither is likely, but neither is unprecedented.